04 Rupert Read on how to activate the climate majority

In his garden in the Norfolk Broads, philosopher, author and climate activist Rupert Read talks to me about climate movements and action. 

We hear of the formation of Extinction Rebellion, thrutopian ideas and transformative adaptation. And how too the declaration of climate emergencies moved thinking and local policies. We hear about the need to focus on a climate majority: the middle 60-70% of the population who know something bad is going on, but don’t know quite what to do. Thrutopia implies going through, a leaning in, the taking of good from bad. 

Rupert’s heroines are Joanna Macy and Greta Thunberg (“small people can change the whole world”, he says).

His books include “This Civilisation is Finished”; Why Climate Breakdown Matters; The Climate Majority Project”; “Transformative Adaptation”.

Rupert recommended action: believe this: most of us are capable of far more than we dare to imagine.

See Rupert’s website: https://rupertread.net/ 

Climate Majority Project: https://www.climatemajorityproject.com/ 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027. It is called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformative Stories for Climate and Nature Recovery."

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Well we're on location in Norfolk on the edge of the sedgy fens and broads of the east of Norwich and I'm with Rupert Reed and what a pleasure it is to be chatting to Rupert here in your back garden on a gorgeous afternoon, which we all love. Rupert's a philosopher and author, engaged in advocacy, politics and media, leading thinker and activist, formerly at UEA, so on the other side of Norwich, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, founder of the wonderfully conceived Climate Majority Project, author of many groundbreaking books, and we'll kind of come to some of those in a moment, Rupert. So thank you so much for your time and for coming on the pod. Let's start with a tell us a bit about yourself and then perhaps um how the Climate Majority Project, because that's one of your leading kind of interests at the moment, and we'll explore some of the other kind of concepts and and and areas of the of creative development, how the Climate Majority Project came about and what it's trying to do. So a little bit about yourself, first of all.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

So as you say, I was an academic for many years. As my academic life went on, it gradually sort of came together in a somewhat satisfying way because my interests, my deep interests in Wittgenstein, in philosophy of language and so on started to come together with my interest in politics and the environment. In other words, I became a kind of eco-philosopher, a political philosopher with a special interest in the crises tragically affecting uh all of our lives and futures and world. And that was great, but it wasn't really enough. So for many years as well, I was very involved in politics, in the Green Party, in direct action. And then we get to about 2016, and that's 10 years ago now. That was a kind of crucial year for me. It was the year when the world's climate started to spin out of control, and it was the year when it became clear to me that the civilization that we're in is not going to continue, that we will manage to transform it radically, or, and unfortunately, much more likely, it will collapse. And that massive realization, which I made known to the world in the series of works called This Civilization Is Finished on various different platforms, This Civilization is finished. That realization precipitated a further sort of change of direction for me. And looking back on it, it was the background, background to me getting involved in the founding, well, not really the founding, but the launching of Extinction Rebellion in 2018. There were people who were putting together Extinction Rebellion who who already founded it. And they put out this film called Heading for Extinction and What to Do About It. I was a very early adopter of this film, and as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh my God, these people have got the same insights as me as to how much trouble we're in. But unlike me, they've got a plan. So I sought them out and uh joined them immediately, Gail Bradbrook and Roger Hallam and the others. Uh, and I helped to actually launch Extinction Rebellion into the world publicly through The Guardian, through the first big public event that we had at the end of October in 2018. That was when I first met uh Greater Thunberg and so on and so forth. So Extinction Rebellion, of course, was a huge thing, and it was a huge thing for me and for frankly pretty much everyone who was seriously involved with it. It was a life-changing thing, very inspiring uh in many ways. After a couple of years of XR, it became very clear to me that XR had reached a ceiling, it wasn't going to break through and do more than it had already done, which was a lot, in terms of waking the public and the world up to the climate and ecological emergency, in terms of making a further massive impact against climate denial, in terms of getting the UK Parliament to declare a climate and environment emergency. I uh organized the meeting with Michael Gove, which happened the day before that vote in uh in Parliament, and more things we could talk about. But it became clear that by 2019 XR was running out of steam, and by 2020 it wasn't going to succeed in doing in actually achieving its objectives. So I started thinking along with a few others in and outside of XR about what might come next. And I started talking about the need for what came to be called a new moderate flank in climate action, that XR had pushed the envelope, it had moved the Overton window, as was its intention, and it had created space for other things to move in and to emerge, and they were already starting to emerge. So it wasn't like myself and my colleagues said, Oh, we need to have this new thing, a new moderate flank, it it would be a complete new thing. No, it was more like we started to see what was already happening from out of and from outside of XR, and we tried to kind of name it and to start to give it some kind of identity. That's what became the Climate Majority Project. The basic idea being we need most people to get involved with climate and nature action if we're gonna make it through this. That's an enormous ask, but it is actually what is required. You cannot do this with just a small minority because climate saturates and is saturated by every aspect of our lives. So sooner or later you're gonna have to have at minimum the willing acquiescence of most people, and probably a lot lot more than that. So that's the enormous ambition of the Climate Majority Project.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

So does that suggest if if I mean putting things on a single spectrum is rather simplistic, but it kind of maybe helps thinking about kind of segmenting uh the population that that you've got um uh a smallish, maybe actually quite big. I mean, I think it could be 20% of people who know we've got a problem and who are already acting, they're doing stuff in various ways. But you could argue it's less than that, but it's probably not that much more at the moment. Yeah. Um at the other end of the spectrum, you've got some people who disbelieve it or deny it, or who are just not interested, or weaponizing it in some sort of way. Yeah. And in the middle, very possibly, if it was 20% and 20%, you've got at least 60% who know there's a problem, they know it in their bones, they can see it, they can see the weather, which is the proxy for climate, and that is the big signal signalling for them. They see it in the mainstream uh TV news, it reports extremes almost every day. Um and they probably need a different kind of um communication. Exactly. So how how how do you how did you think about approaching that that um that climate majority in the middle who would need a segmented approach? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

So that's the silent might the silent majority that we want to mobilize, and we're working on it in a number of ways. The one that I was going to single out for you today, because we now think it's hugely important, is what we call transformative adaptation or strategic adaptation. We've just done this report um several months ago for the Climate Majority Project called Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience, which is a slight mouthful, but it abbreviates conveniently to safer, which is the basic idea. We are not safe and we're never going to be safe again, unfortunately. But we can become safer, we can reduce our exposure, we can become less vulnerable. Obviously, part of one of the ways you do that is by tackling the fundamental problems at source and reducing carbon emissions, etc. But it's way, way too late now to just think about doing that. We also need to think about how we protect ourselves together, how we move to protect ourselves together. And that can take all sorts of forms. We're working on it, especially in workplaces and in communities. The beauty of climate adaptation, of acting together to create resilience in the long chronic emergency we're moving into, and also in relation to the short emergencies that are the coming uh climate disasters. The beauty of that is it's something which is available to some extent and in certain ways to everybody, right? Everybody lives somewhere, nearly everybody works somewhere or studies somewhere. Those places need adapting and making more resilient. Those systems, those those professions, those organizations, churches, whatever it may be, there is a role for everybody in undertaking various forms of climate adaptation and resilience building. So I'll just give a couple of quick examples. So we collaborate with and incubate a number of uh a growing number of uh of organizations. We work with people, for example, in the deprived inner city of um Birmingham, uh in Balsall Heath, where they're doing fantastic work retrofitting and much more. Retrofit is an absolute win-win-win. It makes people more comfortable, it saves them money, it reduces carbon emissions, it also crucially reduces your exposure to very cold and very hot weather if you do it right. Uh so it reduces your risk. It's a form of adaptation. Um reduces your costs as well. Your exposure. Absolutely. It's a win-win-win-win. Uh it's a it's a cost of living plus as well as all these other things. Um, Greener Henley, very different kind of community, uh, posh part of the country, although actually, like most such places, there are plenty of uh people without much money in and around Henley as well. But uh quite a lot of people there are wealthier than people in Balsall Heath. People in in Henley are very concerned about the the climate and about adaptation because they've got the Thames on their dealstep, you know, the clue is in the name, Henley on Thames, right? And I visited Henley recently uh and had an encouraging experience speaking to the flourishing group there uh in Greener Henley who are looking at these kind of issues in helping them to see that if you're gonna take adaptation seriously and it starts for you with something like what's the potential impact of this river uh upon me, you have to start to think it about what's upstream of you. Right? You can't just do it on your own doorstep, right? That's strategic adaptation. You're thinking about the bigger system, thinking about the bigger system, yeah, thinking about the landscape, thinking about the ecosystem, uh, thinking about in this case, you know, the catchment area ultimately. And of course, once you really start to think about that, you also realise, oh, there's also people downstream from us, right? Yeah, uh, and you then start to see yourself as someone who's not just protecting yourself and your family and your neighbours and so on and so forth, but protecting other people who you've never met. And that's how you start to kind of broaden the picture. So that gives you a fragment of an idea of what strategic adaptation is about. And this is probably the single central element now in what we do in the Climate Majority Project. It runs through the vast majority of what we do, including our work on insurance, our work on what we call inner adaptation, which is building psychological resilience, etc. Uh, it's absolutely crucial, and everybody can get involved.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Isn't it interesting how um uh you can turn a negative into a positive in this way that by say we know that the the the climate crisis, the nature crisis is affecting almost every part of our lives. But that also uh which could sound dispiriting and increasing anxiety, shoulder slump a little bit and so forth. But then it also says, well, actually, there are multiple entry points. Yeah, you can you can you we're not all going to need to do the same thing and we're not all going to need to want to do the same thing. But there's a place where you can start. Yeah, and that place may be different for you, and it may be different for your neighbour, which is fine, yeah, because actually this multiple pronged approach is going to be what's needed. Yeah. Which is actually stronger than saying to people, there's only one thing to do and you've got to do it. Because then people might say, actually, I'm kind of not really that interested in it in some way. You know, it's kind of turning it around rather in a rather clever way, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 11:55

Absolutely, yeah. What I often say to people is don't ask us to tell you the one thing that you need to do. Think about what is the one thing or the two things or the three things, but often it's just one thing that you can do that will make the most difference, the area of your maximum possible contribution. For some people it will be through their job, for some people it may be through political activity, for many people it will be where they live, the community, the neighborhood that they're a part of. And starting in their own home. But you know, if you're gonna adapt effectively, if you're gonna prepare effectively for what's coming, you can't just do it in your own home. You've got to imagine, okay, so what if I become more food resilient and water resilient by having a garden like mine where we're fortunate enough to grow some of our own food and you've got your own uh water in water butts and perhaps stored in uh huge water containers, whatever it might be, if you're thinking, oh, things could get really bad, etc. That's great. But it's not really gonna do you a lot of good for very long if everybody else in your neighborhood is totally unprepared, right? Because what are you gonna do? You're gonna turn them all away, you're gonna kill them all. I mean, honestly, it doesn't work, right? Sooner or later, you have to think at minimum on the neighborhood level and the community levels. You can do all sorts of meaningful stuff in your own house, but it's so much more meaningful if that if you immediately try to look for ways to start to multiply it by, for example, encouraging your neighbours to notice what you're doing and encouraging them to do something similar. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Um, and and by definition, that that that thing for me or for us becomes a wider we as as we kind of move into this space, which which starts to speak to that question of what kind of language and actions do we choose to target the middle 60 or 70 percent or whatever we would think it is in that climate majority. Exactly. So have um in in kind of identifying the actions that are part of a kind of broad suite of things that that that we can do. Some of those will be um things we have to stop doing, and some of those will be uh opportunities to do completely new stuff. So I wondered about the kind of tensions between between how we communicate that. I mean we clearly need to stop some really big stuff like fossil fuels, and you know, they've got to go, they they will go at some point. Um uh it's a slightly different kind of um communication or discussion when we say we want to create something new, a new vision for the future. And I wonder whether this is where your kind of thoughts around throughtopia start to come in, where we say, um because just to have a message that says you've got to stop what you're doing, yeah, um it might be true, but it might not actually very spiriting to hear that. You actually want to you want to go, well, what is that place on the on the hill that we're heading for? What does it look like? What are you telling us that it's gonna be like? You might say we've got to go down quite a long way first, and it's kind of inevitable, but I think we're still saying we're gonna get out of it at some point, in some sort of form, maybe stronger, maybe very different, but it's gonna take some creativity to get to that point. So I wondered about the visions for the future, how we talk about that.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

Yeah, I'm gonna disagree with you slightly here, Jules. I don't think we are gonna get out of it. The fundamental idea of throughtopia is about being in it, but having a path through, through, through, through. We're always in media res, we're always in process, right? One of the fundamental problems when I started to really think about this, about the concepts of dystopia and utopia, is they're both static concepts. They're both fundamentally ideas of there's an end state that we either don't want to get to or do want to get to. But there are no end states, especially now. You know, we've started off processes now such as the uh melting of the ice caps, which tragically, even if we really thoroughly get our act together far more quickly than it looks like we're going to do, those processes are gonna go on for centuries. Sea level rise is virtually certainly gonna proceed for centuries. That's just an example, it's an important example, but it's just one example. So, integral to my idea of through topia is what if we stop thinking only about absolutely only about the doomy scenario, but also about ooh, what if we kind of get out of this and everything's fine? Everything's never gonna be fine. But as we go through this very difficult crucible for a very long time to come, an indefinitely long time to come, as we go through it, things can actually be really great in all sorts of ways, even as they are difficult. I mean, let's take a parallel. Think of the Second World War, right? Awful time, right? People getting killed, people losing people they they loved, no certainty about the future, thinking that maybe you're gonna end up being taken over by Nazism, etc. So what else happens during the Second World War? People's health improves, right? People's mental health improves. Why do these kinds of things happen? It's because we have a shared vision, a shared purpose, right? And that's what we need now, and that's what we can have now. Food rationing, right? We were short of food. We were worried that Hitler was gonna starve us out. So the government instituted food rationing, fantastic scheme for bringing people together and putting them on uh a level, and it increased the health of the population. Suicide rates in the Second World War went down, not up. You might expect, you know, people are losing their loved ones, they're constantly in terror. Suicide rates went down. We don't want to have a war, right? We're in a war right now, as we as you and I speak and record this interview in uh in Iran. We don't want to have a war. We probably get wars whether we want them or not, but definitely what we're gonna get whether we want it or not is the climate and ecological emergency. And also definitely what we're gonna get is a growing polycrisis. We're gonna get more and more difficult impacts for a long time to come from artificial intelligence, etc. So the idea of throughtopia is how do we find a path through and basically more or less endlessly through what is coming in the absolute best way of possible. Turning the bad stuff, as you said earlier, turning the bad stuff into good stuff in the sense that when we face adversity, when we actually face it, right, the emotions that arise in us, the determination that we find, the community that we build, including in situations of disaster, right, it can be actually net positive, even while things are getting materially harder. That I think is the future that awaits us. Frutopia is a vision of how we endlessly get through what is coming in the best possible way. It's thoroughly based on reality. It's not saying we're gonna get out of the hole, it's saying as we constantly try to make sure that we don't get buried in the hole forever, things can actually get better.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Yeah, that's very interesting. And as you as you speak, I'm thinking back to the early discussions about when sustainable development appears on the on the you know, kind of wider discourse in the late 80s, the Brundland Commission. Um, and uh the the as that kind of emerges into people's thinking, there's a strong thread that says that we will arrive at some point somewhere at the station. Being developed. Right.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

It's a fantasy, this idea of being developed, you know, it's an incredibly dangerous idea, it's the most enormous hubris, it's why I've I've argued for a very long time against the standard model of develop developmentality and development. Um being developed is a is a terrible hubristic fantasy of a sort of pseudo-utopia. But if we have instead the idea of, okay, there are things that we want to change in order to move away from certain states, there are other things we want to move towards, and then there are there are uh impacts and crises coming at us which we have to roll with, which we have to transform around, that's a much more realistic notion. That's a notion of adaptation, that's a notion potentially of throughtopia.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

And is is that also seems to suggest to me that that it was going to need a great amount of creativity from everybody. Oh, absolutely. Um and all sorts of different people. It's not there'll be people working on technology and there'll be artists and musicians and writers, and and and I'm particularly interested in how we create kind of broader story that that allows people to feel as though they're part of a thing that is moving forward. Um in 1989 there's a a UCL uh agriculturalist anthropologist actually called Paul Richards, who wrote a book called Agriculture as Performance. Um and he was making, in a sense, kind of precisely this point and saying, focus on on poorer countries, agriculture, small farmers, and so forth. Saying it doesn't finish. The things you're working on are like a continuous performance. You're on a stage, you're performing, maybe nobody nobody's actually looking, but but but you know, tomorrow it's gonna be different again and it's going to be, there's no end point. But what you then need to think about is the capabilities to be able to address that continuing challenge, which is against, I guess, what you're saying with with Throotopia is absolutely if we're organized and we've got collective action that's gonna be stronger than one person. If we've got um ideas about reducing our carbon footprints by replacing bad stuff with better stuff, then we're gonna be stronger. And and you can list you know 20 or 30 things straight off that that kind of help in that.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yeah, absolutely. So this is the fundamental idea of strategic adaptation uh and also of uh transformative adaptation, as in the little book that I did on that with Morgan Phillips and and Manda Scott. As you say, it's an idea for everybody, it's especially an idea for everybody who is seeking to do creative work of any kind, you know, which includes you know architects and philosophers and so on. And above all, if you will, the people who have the most important responsibility of all here are those who are who are, as it were, professionally tasked with imagination. So I'm thinking especially now of artists, writers, filmmakers. Um Troutopia is is if we're gonna achieve any elements of throughtopianism in the real world, it's gonna require all of us, it's gonna require all of us to lean into the kind of adaptation spirit uh that we need. It's gonna require enormous feats of creativity, creativity, and imagination. And above all, that suggests that those who have to step up are those who are perhaps the best of all at this. They haven't, in my view, been doing a fantastic job until recently. As Amitav Ghosh argued in his book, The Great Derangement. Unfortunately, novelists especially have really failed until very recently to step up and seriously address the climate and nature crisis. They are now starting to do so, and that gives me some kind of faith that the the age of throuttopianism might be dawning. I'm thinking of people like um Ian McEwen, uh I'm thinking of uh uh of a novel and a film like uh The End We Start From. I'm thinking of some of Amitabh Ghosh's uh own uh recent work. There are elements of throughtopianism emerging uh into um popular and great uh literature and artistry. I'm thinking of Richard Powers' work. Uh this is I think really, really important. It's really important that we recognize these works and that we value them and that we take them seriously.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Exactly. Uh I mean a good story lasts for a thousand years. So, I mean, you know, our oldest stories have lasted a lot longer than that. You know, um the oldest written one is 5,000 years old. And um I often say that as a challenge to people when kind of creating a language about what they want to do and what they want to change in the world and um how you set yourself a challenge. And I quite often say, well, look, you know, can you create something that will last a thousand years that will get in people's minds and that they will say, Oh yeah, that thing, that's gonna really kind of change, that's gonna change some fundamental stuff.

SPEAKER_02 24:02

Um we need um uh system level change, and um we've had bits of it. So, for example, a number of the council houses around here where uh I live, this is a former uh council house, some of the uh some of my neighbours are still council houses. Uh a number of those had uh solar panels put in by the council. That's great. You know, that's the kind of thing that should have been rolled out so much more already. Better late than never, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Imagine if it was on all 22 million homes in Britain. Yeah, when you just think about that. Yeah. Um uh there was the news this week. We'll see what happens by the time the pod comes out. The plug-in solar is going is is now permitted. So the the the minister has just said yes, we can do that, and Germany did it a year ago. Um this is the kind of thing that you can put on balconies of flats, so you so you don't need a roof and you don't need a garden. Yeah, you put it on your balconies. In Germany, 1.5 million people have installed them in a year. Um and that kind of suggests that if you get the technology that's accessible, it's not too expensive, and government facilitates with you know taking away regulation or taking away away or putting in place a positive policy, actually, boom, that thing could go quite quickly.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

And there's something else here as well, Jules, which is it's virtually certain, in my view, now that we are going to experience various kinds of um social uh breakdown and collapse type events tragically. As that happens, things like the national grid are gonna become very vulnerable. Uh we are probably gonna sometimes lose the national grid and the internet, these things are gonna flicker. Uh what we really need to do is to be quite trying to build in resilience such that people have uh solar panels and uh heat pumps and insulation systems and water systems and food systems and district heating systems, things which can continue to stand up if and when some of these national level or international level things do flicker. Uh I think people are gonna come to see that as more and more important in the coming years. Very good.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Let's uh let's come to some of the questions that we put a wrap on the pod, um uh Rupert. So um so your prouds, pick you know, pick a proud. Um something that I know I know we've talked about this, it's formation of movements, it's a whole series of wonderful books. Um uh what would what would you point towards the that we like kind of achievements? Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

It's a cute question. I've got uh two specific things I wanted to to share. The first is that in 2018, just before we launched Extinction Rebellion, I was fortunate enough, I was sort of in the right place at the right time to be instrumental in ending the BBC policy of having a climate denier to balance climate scientists. What happened basically is the BBC asked me on to debate against uh a climate denier, and I said no, I won't do it. Uh and I I tweeted out that I wasn't gonna do it. One or two people tweeted back saying, oh, you should always, you know, you should always take the publicity, take the opportunity, etc. But within a few days I had 40,000 retweets and news articles from around the world about the fact that this tweet had completely blown up because people had obviously thought, yes, that's right, we shouldn't debate the buggers. And it was it was in that sense, it was the single most viral thing I've ever done. And it through a chain of events over the next couple of months, it appears to have led to the BBC uh that autumn saying, right, that's it, we're not gonna do this anymore. It's pastime for for having the Nigel Lawsons, etc., of this world getting equal time if people actually know what they're talking about. So I'm quite proud of that. Lovely. And then the much more recent one, I'm proud of the role that I've been playing that I'm still playing right now as we record this, in the publicity of the national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse that was commissioned by the government last year. Uh they were supposed to publish it. Uh they decided last October not to publish it. There was a freedom of information battle uh which resulted in it being published a couple of months ago as we record this. Only it turned out that what had been published then was not still the full version. So I've been working and working on the media and through my contacts in government and behind the scenes to try to get this story to go big and to get the media to really take it seriously. And it's been hard, but we have had success. In particular, what I'm very proud of is the story which I helped to engineer the conditions for, uh which appeared on ITV. And if anyone hasn't seen it, I really recommend you see it. Perhaps you can put it in the show notes. Uh, the ITV, in particular, the nine-minute explainer that ITV did about what's in the actual still suppressed version of this report, which is by the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was presented at Cobra last October. And so, you know, this is if you if you're someone watching this who's like, well, you know, this is all great, but I'm not really sure whether I believe everything Extinction Rebellion says, maybe they're alarmists or something. Okay, do you think that MI5 and MI6 are alarmists? They're they're generally thought to be pretty hard-headed uh people, and they are saying every global ecosystem, this is pretty much a direct quote, every global ecosystem which is important for this country is under threat of collapse. I mean that is incredibly awful, and they draw out some of the consequences in terms of our our poor, desperately poor state of food resilience uh in particular. Everyone needs to know this because if we don't know about it, how can we actually know how to prepare? Right? So this is a great wake-up call, and yeah, I'm I'm proud that I've played a role in getting this out through the times, through ITV. There's a lot more to be done, but it is happening and it is contributing to a situation where it's becoming harder and harder for the idiots in Spiked or Reform UK, etc., to get away with saying, Oh, well, you climate alarmists, etc. You know, do they think that MI fix MA5 and MI6 are alarmists?

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Yes, yeah. It it is the the topic moves into a new sphere and then a new set of you can see why they didn't want to publish it, but it's interesting. That's right, it's interesting. Um uh a personal hole, get it for if you know, being in a hole and getting out of the hole. You know, kind of for you personally, for our guests, how how did we how did you get out? What was it that that allowed the the challenge to be overcome?

SPEAKER_02 30:23

So I'm gonna give another recent one here, and it's very personal. I'm gonna uh tell you what happened to me this past Christmas. So I've been working very hard in the autumn, probably overworking, came towards Christmas time, thinking of finally clearing my desk, you know, finally getting through it, finally some days off. I was like hanging on for Christmas, hanging on. Got a Christmas Eve, I was sitting in that room there, I finally cleared my desk. It's a beautiful afternoon. It's lunchtime, I'm like, oh, this is so good. I can relax. Just me and my wife for the next few days, nothing to do, turning the phone off, everything is gonna be so great. A few hours later, I found myself in a really awful hole. I found myself in a state of extreme polychrisis anxiety. Now, I've had, as probably many people watching this have had over the years, episodes of climate anxiety, eco-anxiety, and some of them have been terrible. But in the last few years, I felt that I was able to deal with them. I had ways through them. I would typically phone a friend, do a bit of meditation, work on it for a few hours or at most a a day or so, and then I'd sort of be out the other side. But this wasn't like that, because for the first time ever, I found myself worrying really badly about climate and ecology and AI and geopolitics and democratic threats to our democracy all at the same time. And I can tell you if you haven't experienced that yet, it's a lot harder than just worrying about climate, which is hard enough. Uh so I found myself in this awful, awful hole, and I didn't know what to do about it. And so I had the weirdest Christmas ever. Pretty miserable, difficult Christmas. When this kind of thing happens to me, because as I say, I have experienced stuff like this before, when this kind of stuff happens to me, I use it to the max. I instantly went into various kinds of meditation, including developing new meditations. I phoned various kind of friends, I spent time kind of reflecting deeply and walking in in nature, and various things came out of it, including various practical changes. For example, I've now finally given up working on Saturdays. I'm really taking the whole weekend off, and this is making my life more more manageable and my personal state um less vulnerable, you know, I'm less exposed as I was so exhausted on that Christmas Christmas Eve afternoon. But perhaps more interestingly to listeners, what I also found with the especially with the help of one or two climate majority colleagues who I consulted around about the 26th, 27th, 28th, when I was still really going through it, um, was an understanding, a deeper understanding of what was going on. So what one person in particular said to me is Rupert, the way I'm seeing this is the world is entering into a kind of state of breakdown and partial collapse, and so are you. You know, you're the you're being the microcosm of the macrocosm. This person said to me, This is what you teach, this is what you teach in your in your spiritual adaptation work, for example, Rupert. This is this is it you're experiencing it yourself now. It's the you're it's real in you, and but that shouldn't surprise you so much. And when I saw it that way, I thought, oh yeah, that's right. And it kind of it made a deeper sense, and I was able to experience what was happening to me as part of something much bigger, and not just as a kind of individualized psychological crisis, but truly part of what's going on around the whole world and on a much bigger canvas. And that was how I started to get out of it. Now, again, you know, have I really kind of completely got out of it? Well, my life has changed. I've inter entered into a deeper sense of collapse awareness, of thinking that through topia it's probably going to be, if it if it occurs, is going to occur through collapses, through breakdown events, etc. But yes, I'm through it, it at least in the sense that I'm no longer in a state of kind of of crisis. I'm my sleep is no longer ruined as it was for quite a while. And I feel like if I get another episode of polycrisis anxiety again, I'll have a better idea of how to handle it. Although I'm trying to make sure there's no hubris and no complacency, because that was part of the problem that I had on the 24th of December. I was kind of thinking to myself at the back of my mind, climate anxiety type stuff, yeah, it's never gonna really take me down again. When it did get taken down, it was hard, but yeah, I feel like I'm kind of through it, through it in a sort of throughtopian sense, hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

That's uh it's a lovely story. I'm glad you told it like that. I mean it's a deep challenge, but it's interesting how those things that happen to us, at some point maybe there's an inflection point where we can turn that to be useful. Yeah. Kind of put it in that way. Absolutely. And that is a path, this throughtopian paths. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

And that is what I always try to do now. Uh so I've already integrated this into my spiritual adaptation teaching and and so on.

SPEAKER_01 35:14

Um uh hero or a heroine? Um a slightly loaded question because these terms are used in kind of difficult forms, you know. All our all our people are heroes. Well, it's kind of no people that you looked up to, you know, that that helped in the journey in some sort of way. Maybe there was the person you just explained, you just described, who who gave gave some key advice at a key moment. But a heroine or a hero? Who is your pick?

SPEAKER_02 35:40

So I do think that it's important that when we think of heroes and heroines, we are prepared to think of collective versions of them. But I am gonna pick an individual because some when you asked me that question, one person came to mind, which is my recently departed teacher and mentor, Joanna Macy, uh, who's influenced me such a lot in terms of being the background for my spiritual adaptation work, in terms of influencing a lot of the writing and the practices that I've done for a lot of years now, uh, around uh grief work, around uh sort of trauma healing, what we call um inner adaptation. Uh Joanna was an incredible person, uh uh a really sort of a sort of almost angelic, almost saintly figure. I mean these terms may sound excessive, but the the last ever evening I spent with her at her house a few years ago, she cooked me uh dinner. Uh she was kind of tottering around, she's in her 90s by now. I was like, oh God, you know, is she gonna fall over? Shall I shall I say, no, I'll cook the dinner, etc. But she wanted to cook me dinner, we had this amazing evening uh together, and it was almost as if there was something kind of numinous about her. She had the sense, she knew she wasn't long for this life, she wouldn't be working much longer, she wouldn't be mentoring much longer, etc. And you could see her kind of really sort of looking and feeling beyond herself to to those around her, to the to the beautiful world of our this beautiful world of ours to which she's given so much. Anyone who doesn't know Joanna's work, consider uh looking for her books, her videos, etc. But you probably do know her work, even if you don't know it by name, because she's influenced so many people, it's not just uh me. I think she is uh a kind of heroine for our times. Very well, very well put. Uh uh an object. Yeah. Well, I've chosen uh a photograph. So this is uh a photo of uh me and Greta Thunberg uh from um during the April 2019 Extinction Rebellion when she came to uh London um and it was the timing was fantastic. Uh so at that meeting, for example, I asked her, Do you support uh Extinction Rebellion? I asked her this in public, and she said yes, and that was very handy. Uh it's a photograph that means a lot to me um because I think she's a kind of extraordinary world historic figure, um, because it's been a privilege to to know her. Uh it's also kind of amazing because when you see this uh photo, you really do get a sense, if you haven't already got it, of how incredibly physically small she is. She's a tiny person, physically. And you know, she's got this book which is called what is it called, something like um very small people can change the whole world or something. Uh it it is quite idea, isn't it? It's quite inspiring that someone who is so very small can have this kind of outsize influence. And I I'm speaking almost in metaphors here, right? Um but it does seem to me that that there's something tremendous about a teenager, uh uh a girl, someone who is very small physically, has you know very little physical strength, who has various mental issues that she's wrestled with, etc., was able to step up and do something so important. And I think it gives us a sense of well, if someone like that can do something so influential, then actually the potentialities are there for many of us to do something which is far bigger than we think. And that is exactly what I believe that most of us are capable of far more than we dare to imagine. Brilliant. One top action for listeners and viewers, what would you say? I'm just gonna go right back to where we started and say probably, if you're not someone who has some very kind of specific role or talent or job or whatever, probably the most important thing that you can do in relation to the crisis is to try to find your way of stepping up to build strategic or transformative adaptation, to build emergency resilience, probably where you live, maybe where you work, maybe both, right? And what I'm not saying here is you have to join the safer campaign that's run by the Climate Majority Project. You know, by all means, reach out to us, by all means, you know, we're looking for funders, we're looking for volunteers, etc. That's great. But really, what we are is something which is trying to coordinate or network or argue for or thought lead, something much, much wider. A whole enormous wave of action, which is going to consist to a large extent of huge numbers of citizens where they are based doing stuff together. So that's what I would urge. If you're not already doing that, if you're not already involved in your local area or in your profession or whatever it may be that's best for you in seeking to create food resilience or citizen science or some kind of way of ensuring us and preparing us together against what is coming, then do it. Find your way of doing it and do it. And if you're not sure where to start, then by all means come to the Climate Majority Project website and we can give you some pointers.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Fantastic. Rupert Reed, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much.